Peter B. Kaufman - The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

Cover

The New Enlightenment

AND THE FIGHT TO FREE KNOWLEDGE

Peter B. Kaufman

Seven Stories Press

NEW YORK OAKLAND LONDON

Copyright 2021 by Peter B. Kaufman

Upon this books first publication in 2021, all original writing, text, and ideas herein may be reused and published/republished freely by anyone for any purpose, subject to the terms in the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode ).

Cite as: Peter B. Kaufman, The New Enlightenment and The Fight to Free Knowledge (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2021).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaufman, Peter B., 1963- author.
Title: The new enlightenment and the fight to free knowledge / Peter B. Kaufman.
Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044684 (print) | LCCN 2020044685 (ebook) | ISBN
9781644210604 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644210611 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Sociology of--History. | Freedom of information.
| Enlightenment--Influence.
Classification: LCC HM651 .K385 2021 (print) | LCC HM651 (ebook) | DDC
306.4/209--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044684
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044685

For you, Ellen.

Contents

Preface

This book is one I began more than ten years ago.

Its now one Im finishing in the middle of a plague.

It began as a vision of our knowledge institutionsour universities, libraries, museums, archives, public broadcasters, and othersrecognizing the immense power that they have, especially with the Internet in each of their arsenals.

It began, also, as a call to action for them all to come together and with the power they havewe all haveas publishers to purvey verifiable truths. To have our knowledge institutions put knowledge online. To have us publish facts into a world gone mad.

Its being completed as a health and information pandemic rages around the world. As three hundred thousand newly dead from the pandemic here are buried and cremated.

Its being completed as criminal men try to tighten their grip. As the number of unemployed rises to and passes Depression-era levels. As universities, libraries, museums, archives, and schools worldwide are shuttered and staying closed.

And as fewer and fewer people can even discern truth from fiction anymore.

But this is also a book of hope. How can one possibly write a book of hope now? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract , wrote in his memoirs, during the original Enlightenment: If I want to describe the spring it must be in winter; if I want to describe a fine landscape I must be within doors; and as I have said a hundred times, if ever I were confined in the Bastille, there I would draw the picture of liberty.

The competition for our attention on our screens and our speakers, and the allure of false and malign information, has begun to intensify in ways that were almost unimaginable even a few years ago. The pandemic has provided us with incentives to change the form and frequency of our knowledge conveyance. We are also in a new time, a video age, where the opportunities for free-thinkers can only grow.

How knowledge institutions will handle the challenge of working with videoand with their new responsibility generallyremains to be seen.

Peter B. Kaufman

Lakeville, Connecticut

December 11, 2020

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions , trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1953), 166167.

Part I: The Monsterverse

The Monsterverse

William Tyndale, born in 1494, killed in 1536, believed that the structure of communication during his time was broken and unfair, and with a core, unwavering focus, he sought to make it so that the main body of knowledge in his day could be accessed and then shared again by every man alive. He engaged in an unparalleled act of coding (not for nothing do we speak of computer programming languages), working through the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic of the Bibles Old, then New, Testaments to bring all of its good booksfrom Genesis 1 to Revelation 22into English for everyday readers. He is reported to have said, in response to a question from a priest who had challenged his worka priest who read the Bible only in Latin: I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost. And he worked with the distribution technologies of his timethe YouTubes, websites, and Twitters back thenby connecting personally with book designers, paper suppliers, printers, boat captains, and horsemen across sixteenth-century Europe to bring the knowledge and the book that contained it into the hands of the people.

It wasnt easy. In Tyndales time, popes and kingsRoman pope Clement VII and English king Henry VIII, in particularhad decreed, out of concern for keeping their power, that the Bible could exist and be read and distributed only in the assembly of Latin translations that had been completed by the monk Saint Jerome in approximately 400 CE. The penalties for challenging the law were among the most severe imaginable, for such violations represented a panoply of civil transgressions and an entire complexity of heresies. In taking on the church and the kingin his effort simply and solely to translate and then distribute the Bible in EnglishTyndale confronted the greatest power[s] in the Western world. As he was translating and printing his New Testament in Worms, his leading biographer reminds us, a young man in Norwich was burned alive for the crime of owning a piece of paper on which was written the Lords Prayer in English.

Tyndale knew seven languagesGreek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic among themand with them all he sought to accomplish mainly this one thing: to translate the non-English Bible into English. He was a devout Christian. Such was the power of his doctrine, and the sincerity of his life, one biographer tells us, that during the time of his imprisonmentsome twenty months, before he received the capital punishment for his crimeshe converted, it is said, his [prison] keeper, the keepers daughter, and others of [the keepers] household.

Grim, the fate of the people who spread knowledge.

This was not an uncommon thing during Henry VIIIs timeor Pope Leo Xs or Clement VIIs timein and around the 1500s. Tyndales most rapacious pursuer, Sir Thomas More, himself met a similar end. Henry VIII lost patience with More and initially wished for him to be hanged until he was half-dead, then castrated, then disemboweled and forced to watch his own intestines being burnt in front of him, and then (and only then) beheaded and burnt up whole. But, on the advice of counsel, he relented in favor of a much simpler decapitation:

About Nine [More] was brought out of the Tower; his Beard was long, his face pale and thin, and carrying a Red Cross in his Hand, he often lift up his Eyes to Heaven [...]. When he came to the Scaffold, it seemed ready to fall, whereupon he said merrily to the Lieutenant, Pray, Sir, see me safe up; and as to my coming down, let me shift for myself. Being about to speak to the People, he was interrupted by the Sheriff, and thereupon he only desired the People to pray for him, and bear Witness he died in the Faith of the Catholic Church, a faithful Servant both to God and the King. Then kneeling, he repeated the Miserere Psalm with much Devotion; and, rising up the Executioner asked him Forgiveness. He kissed him, and said, Pick up thy Spirits, Man, and be not afraid to do thine Office; my Neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry for having thine Honesty. Laying his Head upon the Block, he bid the Executioner stay till he had put his Beard aside, for that had committed no Treason. Thus he suffered with much Cheerfulness; his Head was taken off at one Blow, and was placed upon London-Bridge [after being boiledand to a black mass], where, having continued for some Months, and being about to be thrown into the Thames to make room for others, his Daughter Margaret bought it, inclosed it in a Leaden Box, and kept it for a Relique.